Crew members watching a scene during the shooting of the movie “Todd Lucas Singer/Songwriter”.

From business-savvy producers to costume designers, it takes a team to make a movie. Now, with the growing popularity of crowd-funding websites like Kickstarter, it takes a village to pay for it.

Since its founding in 2009, Kickstarter has helped filmmakers raise more than $64 million to produce more than 7,000 film and video projects. Using the website as a platform to showcase their aspirations through video pleas and written proposals, filmmakers cultivate enthusiastic supporters willing to throw in some cash to make their idea a reality, from short films budgeted at less than $1,000 to a feature film that costs several hundred thousand, though the bulk falls somewhere in between. (Kickstarter takes 5 percent of the cut and Amazon an additional 3 percent to 5 percent for payment processing.)

But Kickstarter is no place for cheap talk, as the San Diego-based filmmakers behind the feature film “Todd Lucas, Singer/Songwriter” and the short film “Traveling Through Life” discovered this year. The service requires each funding campaign to have a finite timeline; if the clock runs out and the goal isn’t met — even if it’s by just a few dollars — the backers’ credit cards aren’t charged and the project is dead on arrival. If the campaign is a success, you better be ready to deliver. As “Todd Lucas” director Ian Thorpe put it, “Once you say you’re doing it and people start giving you money, the pressure is on.”

Five years ago, Thorpe and Eric Staley, high school friends from Modesto and business partners in a San Diego video production company, optioned the screenplay for “Todd Lucas: Singer/Songwriter,” a 1980s-set comedy that pokes fun at the pop music and fashion of the neon era. The project stalled until fall 2011, when they approached Kevin Tostado, a local filmmaker they met while working on his 2010 documentary “Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story,” which Tostado partially financed through Kickstarter.

Tostado agreed to sign on as producer. His first order of business was to commit to a start date, then launch a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising $50,000 in 25 days. After thousands of emails with creative pleas, the campaign concluded on April 27 — $909 over the goal. With additional money from investors, “Todd Lucas” was ready to commence filming around San Diego County in July with a $155,000 budget. Even better, the enthusiastic response from the film’s 226 Kickstarter backers lured more investors (the producers are seeking additional funding to cover finishing and marketing costs).

For smaller-scale productions like “Traveling Through Life,” a Kickstarter campaign can determine whether a film is made at all. The crew had already collaborated on several ultralow-budget short films before setting out to make this 30-minute sci-fi tale about a boy confined to his home under mysterious circumstances. As writer/producer Jason Lethert said in the campaign video, they hoped to raise $8,000 to take their film “to the next level of production quality and professionalism.”

Their earnest plea struck a chord. After a 30-day campaign led by producer Rachel Marks, they raised $9,000 from 98 backers, enough to shoot and edit the film, pay the cast and submit the finished product to film festivals across the country.